The world's most advanced computer isn't made by Apple or Samsung, or owned by Nasa.

It's the human brain.

At the Human Brain Project (HBP) they want not only to understand the brain, but to replicate it as well.

Funded by €1.2bn (£960m) of European Union money, they are around 18 months into a 10-year mission to "reconstruct the brain piece by piece" using supercomputers.

The HBP is based in Switzerland out of Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), but incorporates scientists from 10 - mostly European - countries.

They hope the research gathered along the way will lead to advances in technology, health and science.

While health and science may seem obvious areas of focus for a study of the brain, technology would seem the least important of the three.

But speaking to Sky News at Imperial College as part of London Tech Week, one of the HBP's coordinators, Professor Sean Hill, said technology is more important to them than you might think.

"The Human Brain Project is funded by a technology programme in the European Commission," he said.

"The flagship project is for technological innovation and for the benefit of society."

Professor Hill was speaking at Imperial's Data Science Institute in a lecture entitled "Building the Brain from Big Data".

The location for his talk is significant.

As you would imagine, there is a lot of data on the brain out there and the Human Brain Project wants to bring it together; data integration rather than data generation, to use Professor Hill's words.

But critics of the Human Brain Project say it is too concerned with the details.

Chris Eliasmith, a neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, said: "I'm concerned about the Human Brain Project dedicating so much of its effort to the lowest level biological details.

"The main focus of neuroscience is really to try to relate the complex activity that we observe in the brain to complex behaviour.

"If we just focus our resources on reproducing some of the complex activity of the brain, that’s not answering this question about how does that complex activity give rise to all of the amazing, flexible, adaptive behaviours that we observe in animals."

The Human Brain Project is not the only current major study into the brain.

Last year Barack Obama ordered a $100m (£58.7m) brain-mapping project, with the chief aim of finding cures for conditions like Alzheimer’s and autism.

With so much money being spent on brain research, some scientists have been critical of the Human Brain Project’s budget.

But its supporters don't see the problem.

"Think about how many neurons are in your brain. You divide it by one billion (euros) and it’s nothing!" said Professor Yike Guo, the director of Imperial's Data Science Institute.

"My view is this is money well spent. Maybe €1bn is big, but if we understand the brain (then) it's very worth it."